Planes, trains and trucks | What it takes to get Bill Atwood's lobsters from the midcoast to the rest of the country

Lobsters are big business in Maine, but for Bill Atwood, the challenge isn't catching them ˆ— it's transporting them from his buying station in Spruce Head, south of Rockland, to just about anywhere in the world.

Atwood's family has been catching and selling lobster for three generations. His father and grandfather came to the United States from Nova Scotia in the 1920s and started a buying station in Boston. They moved the operation to Maine in the 1950s, where a young Bill Atwood learned the business working summers while putting himself through business college in Boston.

Atwood, 65, started the William Atwood Lobster Company in 1962, shipping lobsters by express train to wholesalers in New York. He has since expanded his business to supply live lobster and other shellfish to wholesalers across the country; his company even ships lobsters four or five at a time to individuals worldwide.

Mainebiz spoke with Atwood recently about the logistical challenges of getting lobster from here to there.

Mainebiz: How did Atwood Lobster get started?
Atwood: I developed this business myself. I'm third generation [in the lobster business]. My father and grandfather lobstered in Boston Harbor, and they started their own business. They moved several times and eventually ended up renting a large building on Fosters Wharf in Boston. They built it up and they were probably the largest facility in Boston at that time. In 1950 it burned, and they made a decision to come to Maine.

So they came up to Tenants Harbor, rented a place and set up shop as Atwood Brothers. They used a lot of railway express out of Rockland [to ship lobster] at the time. They would put barrels on the train leaving Rockland, and they would get to Virginia by the next morning. They shipped in trailer trucks to New York City, and furnished lobsters to Fulton Fish Market. It was the biggest fish market, because with the delivery system they had then, all the small purveyors came to New York City to get their product and then went back out. Now, most of the [distributors] are bypassing that.

After my grandfather died in the 1940s, there were a few family members involved ˆ— my father, my uncle and two aunts owned the business. The sisters owned one third of the business together and ran the office. So I worked there through high school and spent a couple of years in the Marine Corps. Then I went to business college [at Burdett Business College in Boston] for two years, then went back to the family business, working off and on, like all the family did. In 1962 I decided that there were too many people and I seemed to be the one who was working the hardest, in my eyes anyway. So I rented a wharf over in Spruce Head and started my own buying station, the William Atwood Lobster Company.

Now we have two locations, one at the old company, which is now closed. I bought the Atwood Brothers facility, which is just a granite wharf down in Tenants Harbor that I use for servicing fishermen, and then another in Spruce Head [that serves as the packing and distribution hub for Atwood Lobster].

What is the process of getting a lobster from the water to your customers?
There are several layers. The fisherman is the first tier. They go out and catch the lobster. Buying the lobster from the fisherman is the next level. Stage three is marketing the lobsters. We do fresh marketing, to supermarkets anywhere from California to Italy and also to restaurants, hotels and seafood events. That's what we're pretty good at [rather than selling to distributors who then sell to the supermarkets and restaurants].

We buy the lobsters from the fishermen, they're banded and we just make sure they're alive and the quality is okay. They've got live tanks on the boats now, so there's really not too much of a problem [with quality]. After they've sold us their catch, we put [the lobsters] in crates. The biggest advance for the dealers has been the plastic crate. You can imagine how difficult the wooden crates were for the dealers ˆ— they've been half soaked up and each crate weighed different, so you had to weigh each crate when you were buying the lobster.

Now you don't have to do that. You can actually pass the crate to the fishermen and they load them and just subtract the weight of the crate [to determine the weight of the lobster]. At our place, we hoist the crates up, take them across the street and put them in our holding systems that hold them in a tank about two feet deep. It's shallow so guys can get in the tank in their boots. It's just like herding cattle. Each one is marked where it came from, then we grade by size and quality. It's better for [the lobster] to stay overnight in the water because they've been thrashed around in the boat; it calms them down, gets some of the bait out of them.

We have our own fleet of trucks ˆ— ten or twelve of them ˆ— so we deliver to Boston's airport everyday. Sometimes we go into Kennedy [Airport in New York] for foreign shipments, usually three times per week. We truck lobster for special events as far down as Virginia. We used to have a route to Florida, but we've given that one up ˆ— it's too far, and it tied up a lot of equipment.

[The lobsters are shipped] in forty- or fifty-pound boxes. If we ship via air, we have a lot of large wholesalers who we can ship to in what are known as LD3 cans ˆ— you might see them at the airports. They take everything from flowers to swordfish to whatever. We pack them right here [in Spruce Head]. When we do it, it tends to go right; when someone else packs the can for us, it tends not to go right.

On the other end, the container will be put on a platform in Phoenix or California, and the wholesaler will unload the container and take out the boxes that are inside. That's a wholesaler who probably has tanks of his own, and he redistributes the lobster.

When you ship via air, do you use particular freight carriers?
We have some freight forwarders for the European stuff. We use them because they're there [in Europe] coordinating things, telling us which flight to go on.

We don't use freight forwarders for domestic distribution. Most of the time we can book that ourselves with the airlines ˆ— American or Delta or whoever it is. Everybody has their hub, and you have to watch out when you get to those hubs. Not to say anything bad about Delta, but we've lost lobsters in Atlanta for a day before they found them.

So it's just a matter of getting it on a commercial flight?
Absolutely. We might have three or four cans on a truck going into Boston. We have to be there two hours before the flight takes off. [Since the lobsters have a limited shelf life, you don't want to leave them at the airport for longer than you have to ˆ— so you have to coordinate when you ship them in order to minimize the time they sit at the airport.] It's a coordination thing. Some days we're unlucky and we've only got one can on the truck ˆ— and that doesn't defray our freight costs very well.

How much does shipping by truck cost versus shipping by air?
Well, since you're going to California and you can't get [the lobster] there by truck, there's really no comparison. Shipping to California by plane costs around 50 cents per pound. The cans [that Atwood uses to ship the lobsters] can hold around 3,500 pounds, but because we pack the lobsters in the boxes [and then pack the boxes in the cans], ours usually net around 2,500 pounds with the lobsters. Shipping by truck costs around 25 to 35 cents per pound, plus the cost of the boxes, which are about 15 to 20 cents a piece.

Do you ship out of Portland?
No. I was asked to go up to the transportation seminar that [former] Gov. Angus King put on once, and my comment was, we've got to build a new airport because the planes you bring in can't hold freight. They can hold the one box with five lobsters, but they can't hold freight. The runway is too short. They can't land a wide-body aircraft there. But I think they should move the airport between Augusta and Portland, find a big piece of land. That would be great.

Bangor [International Airport] was beautiful. Back in the 1980s, we went in with a company in Canada and shipped lobsters on a 747 over to Europe for Christmas. I don't do it any more. We're busy at Christmas anyway, so if we were to concentrate on that, it would hurt the rest of our customer base. It would take us a full day to pack the thing.

But they can land anything in Bangor. They've got a beautiful airport, but nobody there.

So Boston is your only option?
Yes, and sometimes it's better to go to New York. If they had better freight out of Bangor that's where we'd be going. But the freight's not going to run if the people aren't there to put into the top of the planes.

Does your location present a problem to getting the lobsters to your customers?
Someone can call up a dealer in Portland, and in two hours he can probably have [lobsters] on the plane. Here, we don't get that business. They have to plan with us. We have the same packing time, but it's a longer driving time. We're not going to drive down there [to Boston or New York] for one order. We have to coordinate it. We'll go for a good customer, especially if it's a big order, but we miss a lot of the 200-to-500 pound orders. That's the disadvantage. The advantage is that I think our labor base and our quality is better ˆ— lobster and water.

Have you had any major shipping disasters?
I had one shipment on the Sept. 11 American flight that hit the trade towers. It was a beautiful flight, because we'd get [the lobster on the planes] the night before and those planes would take off for California at six or seven in the morning and the guys out there would have them at eleven o'clock. So the first flight that hit there, we had one can headed for Los Angeles. That was a disaster.

We had five other [shipments on Sept. 11] ˆ— two stuck in Kennedy, two in Atlanta and one in Orlando ˆ— when they shut the airports down. We salvaged half of the ones in New York after two days. The one in Florida, they released, and one of the other ones in Atlanta survived, and the other one didn't. That was a major loss for us, and nobody pays insurance on stuff like that. A can like that would hold about 2,200 pounds [of lobster], and at that time of year, in September, it would be going for around five or six dollars a pound.

There was once a problem with a shipment for an event in Colorado. The flight went from Boston to Atlanta, and the airline said they would switch to a plane big enough to accommodate the can to Denver. Well, the plane they switched to wouldn't fit. So they unpacked the lobsters, got them totally confused and the lobsters never showed up. Fifteen hundred people rioting, saying "Where's my lobster?" We split the loss with the people on the other end. But Delta held by the old rules ˆ— whatever you put down for a value on [the paperwork] is what they give you, no damages. But that's part of the business.

You also have a retail lobster business?
Yes, the retail part would be putting five lobsters in a box and sending it FedEx or UPS all over the country. We pack them all the same. We line the container and use a couple of gel-ice packs, which weigh about three pounds each. So 40 pounds of lobster weighs 55 pounds in the package. We ship using UPS and FedEx in a Styrofoam box. Retail is mostly domestic. We have gone as far as Scotland. It's really not worth it, though, because they could call someone in London and get lobsters from here quicker that way.

What is the window like for keeping the lobsters alive?
Well, you've got a customer waiting. To delay it a day, he's blown it. He has nothing [to sell] for a day. So everything is time sensitive.

Do you employ people who coordinate logistics?
Well, we all know it. The sales people have an idea of the logistics. They're not going to make a sale until they know how to get it there. We've been through that with new sales people, saying "Look at all the lobster I've sold," and you ask them, "How are you going to get them there?" So we have three people in sales and one support person, and they do all the air billing and coordination.